What zombie movies tell us about ourselves

Published 5:30 am, Saturday, March 20, 2004

Count Dracula may be a powerful fictional character and a superb villain. But he's also a strong symbol -- of contagious disease, of unsettling foreign influences, of the dark mysteries of sex.

Dr. Jekyll unleashed the gruesome Mr. Hyde more than 100 years ago. But the nightmares he let escape with him still prowl -- fevered dreams of creeping madness, of repressed urges, of the horrors of addiction.

Each monster matches his age. And for this age, right now, the monster of the moment is the walking dead.

Zombies have never gotten the respect that other monsters have. Perhaps it's because, unlike Dracula, Frankenstein's creature or Dr. Jekyll, they don't have the fusty intellectual pedigree of ancient European myths or classic literature.

Perhaps it's because, requiring no special effects beyond some pancake makeup, they've always been the first refuge of the B-movie monster maker. From Plan 9 From Outer Space to Night of the Living Babes, grease-painted corpses have stalked through decades of bad cinema.

Yet last summer's 28 Days Later and Cabin Fever, horror movies about runaway infections, became sizable hits by mimicking the setup of the modern zombie movie. And the new Dawn of the Dead is a big-budget "re-imagining" of the same-titled 1978 film from George Romero, whose original Night of the Living Dead rewrote all the genre rules a decade before.

Once again, the zombie walks among us.

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His meaning has changed over the decades. Originally, zombies were creatures of cultural mythology, their stories rooted in the voodoo practices of Haitian shamans. White Zombie, made in 1932, sketched out the lore quickly -- how mystical practices caused the dead to rise silently, work tirelessly and mindlessly serve their master.

The film, despite its impoverished look -- it was shot on the cheap, independently, with a desperate Bela Lugosi working for practically nothing -- eventually became a cult hit. Later ubiquitous as a public-domain video title, it inspired metal bands and underground artists.

Contemporary audiences, however, needed no sense of irony to appreciate its horrors.

If the same year's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was about the loss of control, or the previous year's Frankenstein had been about the perils of progress, White Zombie was about the loss of self and the eradication of will. Released during the very heart of the Depression, its images of soulless drudges were horrifying on more than one level.

The subsequent rise of the Production Code, however -- with its strictures against anything that might offend mainstream religions -- made zombie movies, with their roots in religious practices, problematic at best. There was no room for other gods in '30s Hollywood, particularly ones who listened only to a Haitian master.

And so the voodoo wizards and the occult masses began to disappear. Mad scientists took over the job of reviving corpses, or the zombie was played for easy laughs -- fit to chase Bob Hope around a Paramount soundstage, perhaps, but no more than that. The walking dead were stilled.

There were a few exceptions. In 1943, Jacques Tourneur's I Walked With a Zombie -- made under the imaginative guidance of fabled film producer Val Lewton -- returned the legend to its Afro-Caribbean roots. An intelligent script gilded the story with poetic references to Jane Eyre and a genuinely eerie feel.

Zombie movies faded away after that, however, appropriated by the cheapskate studios on Poverty Row (and eventually filmmakers who merely aspired to that status, like Ted V. Mikels and Edward D. Wood). By the '60s, the walking dead were out of fashion, saved for second-feature status in old-fashioned horrors like The Plague of the Zombies.

George Romero changed that.

Night of the Living Dead, released in 1968, was revolutionary in many ways. It was shot independently, financed with private funds and made in Pittsburgh and rural Pennsylvania. It was made without any concessions to censorship -- featuring scenes of gory cannibalism (in black-and-white, thankfully) and even flashes of nudity.

Most importantly for the genre, though, Romero and John A. Russo's script stripped the zombie story of its traditional trappings. There were no drums, no voodoo priests, no ancient curses. In fact, there was no real explanation at all. The monsters were simply among us, and all you could do was run.

What initial audiences found most inspiring about the movie was its weird relevance at a time when the culture was falling apart.

Its besieged black hero made it possible to see it as the story of a coming race war, while other characters hinted at a film about the destruction of the American family. Its pure anarchy -- unlike earlier zombies, these mindless creatures served no person or purpose -- mirrored a nation beginning to be pulled to pieces by violence.

Meanwhile, Romero's relentless close-ups -- of arms bursting through boarded-up windows, of little girls brutally attacking their parents, of human monsters gnawing on body parts -- made it both impossible to look away and imperative to try.

Romero had found his theme, and it was one he would revisit.

In The Crazies -- clearly an uncredited inspiration for 28 Days Later -- a military experiment turns a town into a mass of quivering rage. In the Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead sequels, the zombie plague widens, moving into the cities and taking over even that most sacred of American institutions, the shopping mall.

The images of mindless consumerism was nearly Swiftian in its misanthropy: We have met the zombie, and he is us.

The movies prematurely capped Romero's career; although he's gone on to direct a number of other films, including Creepshow and The Dark Half, nothing has come close to the trilogy of the Dead. But even after he left it behind, the zombie genre he unearthed -- revived, revitalized and redeemed of all its magical mumbo-jumbo -- continues to stumble across our screens.

Its meaning is less specific now, although often just as political. In films like David Cronenberg's They Came From Within or Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, the zombies aren't even technically zombies at all, but merely a mindless mass, driven to infect and destroy everything they touch. Nihilism is their beginning and their end.

While each director, coming from different times, explored different subtexts -- for Cronenberg it was the sexual revolution, for Boyle the age of rage -- their common fears of groupthink and mob rule remain clear. Any group of people, once they surrender their conscience, can become a gang of zombies, inspired by nothing other than constant self-gratification.

In the latest Dawn of the Dead, though, Romero's original, class-conscious approach has been subsumed by different images.

Johnny Cash sings on the soundtrack of judgment day, and TV preachers talk about Armageddon. One hero describes himself as a devout Catholic while another man talks about his need to atone; there are worries that this is indeed the "end of days" and when the shaken survivors assemble in a deserted mall, it's at a coffee shop called Hallowed Grounds.

If we are living during a time of religious revivalism -- as everything from The Passion of the Christ to "faith-based initiatives" would suggest -- then Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead is here to tell us it has come too late. Redemption is no longer an option, it warns us; "resurrection" has become only a grisly joke.

From beaten-down workers, to rampaging hordes, to warnings of our own damnation -- once again, the zombies ride the zeitgeist.

More than 70 years after Bela Lugosi first balefully fixed the camera with his gaze, the living dead still stalk. And if the fears they engender have changed over the years, their ability to evoke those fears -- even on levels we don't immediately realize -- remain as powerful as a crossroads at midnight, as unsettling as a branch scratching at a windowpane, as startling as a door swung open in the dead of night.